ReachCustomersOnline.com

Computers, circa 1852

Posted by TimSlavin at June 11, 2004

This week I started to read Into Thin Air, John Krakauer's book about the 1996 disaster on Mt. Everest that killed six people. Mostly I want to live in a different place, in my head at least, for an hour or two a day for the next few weeks.

Early on in the book I read that a computer in 1852 calculated that Everest (called Peak XV on the maps then) was the tallest mountain on earth. At that time people who did computations as part of geographic surveys were called computers. Radhanath Sikhdar was the computer who "discovered" the tallest mountain in the world. So computer was a job title, not a machine. Even more interesting, the 1852 calculation was only 26 feet off from our modern day calculation of the height of Mt. Everest.

Adventure stories aside, this week I was able to post a more normal amount of items to the website. But not everything. I did find another all-in-one software install that will install and configure Apache, PHP, MySQL, and Perl, XAMPP, which I will post next week. MarketingSherpa also had an interesting set of notes from a recent email newsletter conference that discussed whether or not emailers should pay to be white listed by ISPs, Show Notes From INBOX Email Event in San Jose: Whitelisting is Hottest Topic - Should You Pay? (content free until June 20, 2004).

This week I also got a new CSS/XHTML design for the website, through the Rent A Coder website. I hired a guy in Petaluma, California and got my code in two days. The best part: the code displays perfectly on 13 of 16 OS and web browser combinations at Browsercam (IE 5.0 and 5.5 displayed the code with 10px too much spacing between columns). My idea is to add to the home page many of the links that I use daily to find items to publish the website, stealing an idea from Drudge Report. My new website design should be up no later than early July.

Thanks for reading and for your site visits! See you next week.

Tim

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